Blog Comments & Posts

As the owner of a small, 2-person business, I found your blog post interesting and I think you hit on some salient, valid points regarding how online advertising and SEO have pretty much written off small businesses who can't afford the high costs of buying ad clicks and ongoing website optimization costs.

There is definitely a massive market of small businesses out there that are untapped who could use some basic assistance to improve search engine rankings and site optimization. As a small businessman, I simply can't spend hours and hours every week on SEO when I have a business to run and customers who need attention.

Even automated sites like SEOmoz are out of reach for most small business people like myself. The jargon, graphs and "score cards" are difficult to understand and take too much time to manage and learn, and seem geared more to SEO pros than the average business person, which makes the hefty $99/month pricetag hard to justify. After spending months delving into Google webmaster and SEO guidelines, it's clear that search engines have become way too complicated and ridiculous for anyone but the larger companies who can afford to hire expensive SEO consultants or full-time employees to make their sites conform to the many restrictions put into place over the past number of years.

It used to be easy to get search engine traffic in the "old days" of the Internet with some well-worded meta tags. Now your site is penalized by Google if you don't have all of your small graphics in a single sprite or have too many H1 tags on your page. Small businesses just can't compete in this environment anymore, the Internet and the search engines have written us off and left us behind.